Chineseness in the making: An ethnographic linguistic landscape study of Chinese restaurants in Hurstville, a Sinoburb of Sydney

Abstract

This thesis examines how Chineseness is produced, negotiated and projected through the linguistic landscape of Chinese restaurants in Hurstville, a major Chinese-concentrated suburb, or Sinoburb, in southern Sydney. It addresses a gap in sociolinguistic research by treating ethnic restaurants not only as culinary spaces but as semiotic, affective and ideological sites where diasporic identities are materialised and contested. Chineseness is understood as a historically produced, heterogeneous and continually negotiated diasporic imaginary.

The study combines ethnographic fieldwork, photographic documentation, Google Maps–based spatial mapping and interviews with restaurant owners, residents, and council officials, providing a multimodal account of how Chinese restaurants operate as cultural and ideological artefacts in a superdiverse suburb.

Using the Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis (ELLA) framework, the analysis is organised around three temporal dimensions. The present, through spatial–semiotic and onomastic analysis of shopfronts, shows how materiality and linguistic hierarchies shape diasporic visibility. The past, through diachronic comparisons including Google Street View archives and a mini ELLA case study, reveals how continuity and change are sedimented in the landscape. The future, approached as the proleptic orientation of semiotic practices and explored through affective regimes of nostalgia, insecurity and curiosity, shows how Chineseness is projected to imagined audiences and continually remade.

Theoretically informed by geosemiotics, materialist semiotics and affect in linguistic landscapes, the thesis conceptualises Chineseness as a chronotopic assemblage where historicity, everyday negotiation and futurity converge. It further reframes Sinoburbia not as static enclaves but as emergent ethnic spaces where Chinese restaurants operate as key semiotic and affective sites that produce evolving forms of identity, belonging and multiculturalism.